The ideas for this invention stem from the inventors work with and experience in the placement and subsequent fabrication of a prostheses on rigid dental implants. The inventor is a practicing dentist In recent years, several designs for single tooth dental implants have appeared. However, a rigid endosseous dental implant exhibits little or no axial deflection, as would a naturally occurring tooth. Therefore, failure rates of prostheses which were abutted to both endosseous implants and naturally occurring teeth were high. Flexible implants are beginning to appear. These implants are designed to lessen the stress on the bony tissues directly adjacent to the endosseous implant. The design of this standardized system of removable dental implant insert elements is to address the problem of ascertaining the correct degree of elasticity required to clinically manage the several specific demanding areas of successful implant dentistry and long term case management.
The problems encountered are several. First, is one of non uniform stress, which may manifest itself in several ways. The phenomenon of non uniform stress is observed when a rigid prosthesis is affixed to a rigid implant and a natural tooth, which has some degree of movement. Under occlusal forces, compressive forces (as well as tensile forces) with lateral components in any direction are encountered.
Since the rigid implant cannot follow the tooth through the range of motion, non uniform stresses are transferred from mastication through the prosthesis, and onto the implant and tooth. Catastrophic failure is often the result. Failure may occur at a critical solder joint on the prosthesis, or at the site of the implant/bone interface, in the implant itself, or, most commonly, at the site of the natural tooth/bone interface. The catastrophic failure of any element of the prosthesis or its abutments results in loss of the entire restoration.
However, an even more common problem occurs when placing a posterior implant which turns out to be misaligned (FIG. 6). One of the most difficult problems in implant dentistry is the fabrication of the final prosthesis. Even recently developed elastic implants do not address the problem of non coincident paths of insertion among multiple abutments (FIGS. 6 & 7), nor the fact that as case types change, requirements of elasticity change. The design of this invention is to solve both of these problems by means of a series of elastic implant elements which can be interchanged to allow alignment of multiple paths of insertion and be replaced easily to accommodate changing needs to the patient without removal of the stationary endosseous element itself.